Feast 10 November
Pope. Doctor. The Tome of Leo. The man who met Attila.
Sacred art
The portrait kept with St. Leo the Great is the image this library has of Leo. The honour goes to the person, and through the person to God. It is not a machine, and it is not a substitute for the life written below.
Died 461. Chalcedon received his letter: Peter has spoken through Leo. Two natures, one Person.
If it belongs to Leo, it is here, with a door back into the story.
La Verna, TuscanySeptember 1224
Two years before his death, Francis of Assisi receives the wounds of the Crucified on the mountain of La Verna — the first widely attested stigmata in Catholic history, and the pattern for all later ones.
Montefalco, UmbriaDied 1308
An Augustinian abbess who said Christ had planted his cross in her heart. At death the sisters, by her permission, open the heart and find — they swear — a crucifix and the instruments of the Passion formed in the cardiac tissue. The heart is still kept.
Ludbreg1411; papal recognition 1513
A priest doubts during Mass; the wine in the chalice takes on the appearance of blood. After a century of quiet reservation, Leo X recognizes the relic for veneration.
Santa Francesca Romana, Roman ForumDied 1440
A noblewoman, wife, foundress of the Oblates of Tor de’ Specchi. Her body is under the altar in the church that looks onto the Forum — a Roman matron who would not leave the city to become holy.
Chapel of the Vincentians, Rue de Sèvres, ParisDied 1660; relics in Paris
The apostle of charity. His bones rest in a silver effigy above the altar; his heart is kept apart, long described as unusually preserved. Pilgrims come for the man who invented the parish poor as a vocation.
Pellevoisin, Indre1876
Estelle Faguette, dying of tuberculosis, sees Mary fifteen times. She is healed. The lady shows a scapular of the Sacred Heart and asks for mercy to be believed. Rome approved the scapular; the archbishop approved the devotion.
PaduaDied 1942; body shown in Padua
A tiny Croatian Capuchin, hunched, who sat in a confessional in Padua for thirty years. The body, exhumed for beatification, was found intact and is now in a glass shrine in his church — a confessor who did not leave his box.
Milan; buried at AssisiDied 2006; canonized 2025
A teenager who coded a website of Eucharistic miracles, went to Mass daily, and died of leukemia at fifteen. The first millennial saint — and the reason many people first learned that Lanciano and Bolsena exist.
Christ the King Church, Vilakkannur, Kerala2013; Holy See, 2025
During Mass on 15 November 2013, a face — bearded, wounded, the Holy Face as the Church has always painted him — appears on the consecrated Host. The Host is reserved in a jeweled monstrance. In 2025 the Holy See allowed the diocese to present the event as a Eucharistic miracle.
